Path 2

Path 2

Live: Editors Diss Cam’Ron

January 23, 2006

BOUNCE LIKE THIS

Editors
Mercury Lounge
January 20

I don’t like to play that “music for assholes” card too often but god fucking damn, these Coldplay (Now With Dance Beats!) clowns attracted every stripe of b-list dickswinging dbag for their US debut: an industry-strength line out to Katz’s and yet the doorman still got “c’mon man, I shouldn’t have to wait in line, I write for EW,” while inside people called South By Southwest “Southby” and took turns opining away their hype-wary (but not wary enough) insecurities: “You know, Editors aren’t doing anything new–I mean really, they sound exactly like Interpol–but you know what, it’s all about the songs, and I like ‘Bullets’ a lot.”

People have been dropping Interpol so much so loud in fact, Paul Banks came to see for himself, only to find out Editors are blight lites, parody at best: “It’s easy to follow a PRO-CESSSSS,” nails the mechanistica and doomy vocab and Banks’s bleat but not his bleak. Really this is UK Bravery, all-gloss no-floss, nothing beyond simple post-Franz guitar band arithmetic and false individualization and pimply grabs at identity–Editors, less shaggy, less unkempt, more button-down, “edited” if you will, except please don’t will. At best they pack a beat that gets your date dancing, at worst you’re watching Meatloaf front the Killers while a bunch of gameless early30s prigs grab boobs and grind their pelvises into girls’ backs then explain off their cavemanning as “rocking out” and “being carefree.” Honest mistake my ass.

As I said w/r/t We Are Scientologists, most these bands have two or three good ideas in them (Editors have the funny guitar line on “All Sparks,” the halftime breakdown for “Fingers In The Factory,” and the song title “All Sparks”), the rest of their songs just follow-the-chordnotes needling and vox half the pace, guitar ECHO! and sometimes bunnymen too. Makes sense, as this shameless contemporary cannibalism only goes so far. Hey, at least the dudes who put together Early Naughts UK Downstroke Guitar Band comps in a few years will have a lot of names to work with.

Makes cents, we’ve officially reached the point that pretty much any guitar band from the UK or band that tells people they’re from the UK can book a show in New York and, with the right blog buttons pushed–the ones with digital cameras and me-first mentality, your FADER-lites, your only-early-adopters and baby-with-the-bathwaters–can suddenly become a band people think they’re supposed to care about. Meanwhile, “Blood” sounds exactly like “An Honest Mistake” and not a single person on the internet realizes it because actually this isn’t about the songs at all.